Into The Wild Jon Krakauer Quotes & Sayings

I always wanted to play some kind of instrument - piano, saxophone, whatever. I took it up for a while, then forgot about it because I didn't have the time. — Mads Mikkelsen

I'm not a believer that you should set quotas for these things, because I think what happens is no matter how qualified the woman is who gets the job, people will say she [Hillary Clinton] shouldn't have gotten it. She only got it because she's a woman. That is the problem with quotas. — Christy Clark

[Chris] gave his life in exchange for knowledge and his story is his contribution to the world. I feel complete now to put this story behind me as it was on my mind for quite some time. — Krakauer Jon

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
-Chris McCandless — Jon Krakauer

The fragility of crystal is not a weakness but a fineness. My parents understood that fine crystal glass had to be cared for or may be shattered. But when it came to my brother, they didn't seem to know or care that their course of their secret action brought the kind of devastation that could cut them. Their fraudulent marriage and our father's denial of his other son was for Chris a murder of every day's truth. He felt his whole life turned like a river suddenly reversing the direction of its flow. Suddenly running uphill. These revelations struck at the core of Chris's sense of identity. They made his entire childhood seem like fiction. Chris never told them he knew and made me promise silence as well. — Jon Krakauer

Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me they are the most soothing things in Nature. I am proud to say that I don't know the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one's brain. But when a man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I am a Catholic. — Paulo Coelho

From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness. — Jon Krakauer

A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris's final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow. - describing the mother of Chris McCandless after learning of his starvation in the wild — Jon Krakauer

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich; Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout; My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir; The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin; The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader by Rees Hughes and Corey Lewis; Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls; A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. — Cheryl Strayed

But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That's what was great about them. They tried. Not many do. — Jon Krakauer

As I point out in the very first pages of 'Into the Wild,' I approached this book not as a normal, you know, unbiased journalist. — Jon Krakauer

He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight. — Jon Krakauer

Self-love is about respecting and appreciating every single part of who you are, and being proud to be you. — Miya Yamanouchi

The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive. — Jon Krakauer

For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it's gone. — Jon Krakauer

If I start quoting myself, someone shoot me. My people are from Texas, so they'd know what to do. — T.D. Whittle

I now walk into the wild. — Jon Krakauer

Usually, I get hired because I'm tall. — Peter Falk

If you want to hit me, scratch me, punch me, I'll take it. If you want to yank my hair, spit on me, kick me, I'll endure it. I deserve to be punished. Leave your mark on my body. Show me how much I hurt you, then show me again. Because I'm prepared to withstand anything in order to keep you by my side. — Faith Sullivan

I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. — Jon Krakauer

McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Wit of Porportuk." He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London's romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print. — Jon Krakauer